Ask HN: Would you tell your kids to learn to code?

For sure, the same way that agentic abilities to read and write don't obviate devoting human cognitive attention to those skills, in fact, as study after study show, the cognitive offloading/debt incurred by over reliance on agentic cognitive processing is as bad for the brain as sedentary lifestyle is for the body. Programming is yet again different cognitive work than human language reading/writing- the sequential/logical precision and the abstraction creation AND the interactive functionality are unique and valuable. Use of prompt-> code techniques for code or asset authoring AND use of LLMs to provide non-deterministic interactive elements widen the creative landscape. They have to be properly scaffolded, of course, to require requisite cognitive input to get useful output- giving people cannons they can light with a match is wrong and inhumane. But within those to-be-developed regulatory guardrails, the activity of interactive system creation including stroke by stroke visual creation and line by line code creation is still super cool, fun, and useful for kids to experience.

Also I don't see professional software becoming "black-boxed" the way compiler produced machine language is or the way ML models are. Certain isolated components whose characteristics and behaviors can be sufficiently and more efficiently specified and verified with human language sources will be black boxes but in many circumstances the code is the most efficient and precise and correct rendition and that will be the material in which human work occurs. Cheers.

>solving problems with programming and mathematics, but I fully embrace the fact that the field doesn't have any place for those who enjoy the activity itself anymore. Now it's all about feeling empowered to prompt on subscription and see magic unfolding, and it's a matter of time until the languages we know know are treated like a low level abstraction in the same way assembly is.

You think there's no much point in learning to code by hand anymore as a means to financial freedom?

Yes. Have and did. Also something I thought would be useful, I showed them codex and pay a subscription. Another time later I sat down with them and done a code repo walk through. This time without codex and refactored the codebase, talking through refactoring and modularity and explaining the limitations of prompt driven development. I believe we are at a unique time for learning and those who are curious enough and have the attention for it will find new joys in learning to write software and understand systems. We live in a system so learning how to write programs becomes a way to start seeing systems. Ie. Critical thinking, the gold standard!

I’d introduce them to it and see if they’re interested. If so, I’d give them more and eventually various branches that may particularly interest them (e.g. CS theory). If not, I wouldn’t push them.

Why not start with making scratch games or blinking rpi lights or something?

Make it about problem solving and fun? Forget about “industry” and what everyone else is doing!

I too started at an early age, and it was just about fun for me!